Black Americans built this country. They were denied its promises for centuries — through slavery, through Jim Crow, through systematic disenfranchisement that was not accidental but engineered. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a hard-won recognition of that history and a commitment to never repeat it. Yesterday, the Supreme Court moved our country backward with their decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which is a direct attack on Black voting rights. While declaring that they upheld the VRA, the majority gutted its provisions, undermining its intent and its impact in advancing American democracy.
We are clear about what this ruling does: it weakens the protections that communities in the South have fought for, bled for, and died for. It makes it significantly harder to draw majority-minority districts as a remedy under the VRA, removing the history of systemic racial discrimination and voter suppression as a qualifying justification, and setting a near impossible standard to meet in practice. It makes districts that were drawn as VRA remedies vulnerable to challenges, and gives a green light to legislatures that will work overtime to redraw maps to dilute Black voting power.
The cruel irony is that the Equal Protection Clause — a Reconstruction-era amendment written specifically to protect Black Americans — is now being used to dismantle the very districts that give Black communities political representation.
Voting rights are the foundation of every justice issue. Reproductive freedom, climate action, gun safety, immigrant justice, LGBTQ equality, Jewish safety — none of it moves without the full, equal and protected participation of every eligible voter. When the Court makes it easier to suppress Black votes, it disenfranchises all of us and undermines our already perilous democracy.
This ruling does not exist in isolation. It is part of a broader, sustained assault on American democracy — on the courts, on institutions, on the rights of communities who have always had to fight hardest to be counted. That this is happening as our country prepares to mark 250 years of American democracy makes it not just tragic, but obscene. You do not celebrate a democratic experiment by dismantling it.
As Jews, we know what it means to be marginalized, to be vulnerable, to need the protection of the state and not always have it. As Zionists, we demand self-determination — which begins at the ballot box. You cannot choose your own future if the state is allowed to take away your vote.
Congress must act, as soon as possible, to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Americans must act, as loudly as possible, to organize, lobby, join and support coalitions who have long named voter suppression as a tool of racial control. Zioness has been, and will stay in, this fight.